Learning to answer complex questions over knowledge bases with query composition

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge of knowledge-based question answering (KB-QA) systems which provide crisp answers to user-issued questions by translating them to precise structured queries over a knowledge base (KB). A major challenge in KB-QA is bridging the gap between natural language expressions and the complex schema of the KB. As a result, existing methods focus on simple questions answerable with one main relation path in the KB and struggle with complex questions that require joining multiple relations. We propose a KB-QA system, TextRay, which answers complex questions using a novel decompose-execute-join approach. It constructs complex query patterns using a set of simple queries. It uses a semantic matching model which is able to learn simple queries using implicit supervision from question-answer pairs, thus eliminating the need for complex query patterns. Our proposed system significantly outperforms existing KB-QA systems on complex questions while achieving comparable results on simple questions.